Band of Brothers

I’
VE ALREADY TOLD,
in the Acknowledgments in this book, how I came to write about Easy Company. It has been my privilege to have interviewed many of the veterans, starting with Eisenhower and going down the ranks to the privates. This book has been a joy to me, in its reception of course, but most of all through the interviews and my continuing friendship with the men of Easy Company. One of the greatest pleasures of my life has been becoming friends with so many of these men, starting with their commanding officer, Dick Winters, and on down through Sergeant (later Lieutenant) Carwood Lipton, Sergeants Don Malarkey, Paul Rogers, Bill Guarnere, and so many others.

I would, however, be remiss if I didn’t make a special mention of Corporal Walter Gordon. He was the first man I interviewed, and I spent more time with him than anyone else except Dick Winters. Walter was as good a man to interview as I’ve ever encountered in decades of doing interviews, but beyond his knowledge and way of expressing his feelings about this or that aspect of jumping out of perfectly good planes or fighting a battle, he was a marvelous wit. I would spend hours with him in my study (he was a neighbor) and he would leave me weak with laughter. For a period of seven years, before his death in 1999, Walter and I would go to a local restaurant for Friday night dinner. I got to know his wife and kids, lovely people.

Walter Gordon was, at least to me, GI Joe. He exemplified everything that was good about the men in the Armed Forces of the United States in World War II. He said to me once, at the conclusion of a tape-recorded interview, “Now listen, whatever you do in this book, don’t go making me into a hero.” To which I could only reply, “I don’t make heroes. I only write about them.” In this book you can read about them.

S
TEPHEN
E. A
MBROSE

1
“We Wanted Those Wings”
CAMP TOCCOA
July–December 1942

T
HE MEN OF EASY COMPANY,
506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, U.S. Army, came from different backgrounds, different parts of the country. They were farmers and coal miners, mountain men and sons of the Deep South. Some were desperately poor, others from the middle class. One came from Harvard, one from Yale, a couple from UCLA. Only one was from the Old Army, only a few came from the National Guard or Reserves. They were citizen soldiers.

They came together in the summer of 1942, by which time the Europeans had been at war for three years. By the late spring of 1944, they had become an elite company of airborne light infantry. Early on the morning of D-Day, in its first combat action, Easy captured and put out of action a German battery of four 105 mm cannon that were looking down on Utah Beach. The company led the way into Carentan, fought in Holland, held the perimeter at Bastogne, led the counteroffensive in the Battle of the Bulge, fought in the Rhineland campaign, and took Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden. It had taken almost 150 percent casualties. At the peak of its effectiveness, in Holland in October 1944 and in the Ardennes in January 1945, it was as good a rifle company as there was in the world.

The job completed, the company disbanded, the men went home.

· · ·

Each of the 140 men and seven officers who formed the original company followed a different route to its birthplace, Camp Toccoa, Georgia, but they had some things in common. They were young, born since the Great War. They were white, because the U.S. Army in World War II was segregated. With three exceptions, they were unmarried. Most had been hunters and athletes in high school.

They were special in their values. They put a premium on physical well-being, hierarchical authority, and being part of an elite unit. They were idealists, eager to merge themselves into a group fighting for a cause, actively seeking an outfit with which they could identify, join, be a part of, relate to as a family.

They volunteered for the paratroopers, they said, for the thrill, the honor, and the $50 (for enlisted men) or $100 (for officers) monthly bonus paratroopers received. But they really volunteered to jump out of airplanes for two profound, personal reasons. First, in Robert Rader’s words, “The desire to be better than the other guy took hold.” Each man in his own way had gone through what Richard Winters experienced: a realization that doing his best was a better way of getting through the Army than hanging around with the sad excuses for soldiers they met in the recruiting depots or basic training. They wanted to make their Army time positive, a learning and maturing and challenging experience.

Second, they knew they were going into combat, and they did not want to go in with poorly trained, poorly conditioned, poorly motivated draftees on either side of them. As to choosing between being a paratrooper spearheading the offensive and an ordinary infantryman who could not trust the guy next to him, they decided the greater risk was with the infantry. When the shooting started, they wanted to look up to the guy beside them, not down.

They had been kicked around by the Depression, had the scars to show for it. They had grown up, many of them, without enough to eat, with holes in the soles of their shoes, with ragged sweaters and no car and often not a radio. Their educations had been cut short, either by the Depression or by the war.

“Yet, with this background, I had and still have a great love for my country,” Harry Welsh declared forty-eight years later. Whatever their legitimate complaints about how life had treated them, they had not soured on it or on their country.

They came out of the Depression with many other positive features. They were self-reliant, accustomed to hard work and to taking orders. Through sports or hunting or both, they had gained a sense of self-worth and self-confidence.

They knew they were going into great danger. They knew they would be doing more than their part. They resented having to sacrifice years of their youth to a war they never made. They wanted to throw baseballs, not grenades, shoot a .22 rifle, not an M-1. But having been caught up in the war, they decided to be as positive as possible in their Army careers.

Not that they knew much about airborne, except that it was new and all-volunteer. They had been told that the physical training was tougher than anything they had ever seen, or that any other unit in the Army would undergo, but these young lions were eager for that. They expected that, when they were finished with their training, they would be bigger, stronger, tougher than when they started, and they would have gone through the training with the guys who would be fighting beside them.

“The Depression was over,” Carwood Lipton recalled of that summer of 1942, “and I was beginning a new life that would change me profoundly.” It would all of them.

· · ·

First Lt. Herbert Sobel of Chicago was the initial member of E Company, and its C.O. His executive officer (X.O.) was 2d Lt. Clarence Hester, from northern California. Sobel was Jewish, urban, with a commission from the National Guard. Hester had started as a private, then earned his commission from Officer Candidate’s School (OCS). Most of the platoon and assistant platoon leaders were newly commissioned graduates of OCS, including 2d Lts. Dick Winters from Pennsylvania, Walter Moore from California’s racetracks, and Lewis Nixon from New York City and Yale. S. L. Matheson was an ROTC graduate from UCLA. At twenty-eight years of age, Sobel was the old man in the group; the others were twenty-four or younger.

The company, along with Dog, Fox, and Battalion HQ Companies, made up the 2d Battalion of the 506th PIR. The battalion commander was Maj. Robert Strayer, a thirty-year-old reserve officer. The regimental commander was Col. Robert Sink, a 1927 West Point graduate. The 506th was an experimental outfit, the first parachute infantry regiment in which the men would take their basic training and their jump training together, as a unit. It would be a year before it was attached to the 101st Airborne, the Screaming Eagles. The officers were as new to this paratrooping business as the men; they were teachers who sometimes were not much more than one day ahead of the class.

The original N.C.O.s were Old Army. “We looked up to them,” Pvt. Walter Gordon of Mississippi remembered, “as almost like gods because they had their wings, they were qualified jumpers. But, hell, if they knew how to do an about-face, they were ahead of us, we were raw recruits. Later, looking back, we regarded them with scorn. They couldn’t measure up to our own people who moved up to corporals and sergeants.”

The first privates in Easy were Frank Perconte, Herman Hansen, Wayne Sisk, and Carwood Lipton. Within a few days of its formation, Easy had a full complement of 132 men and eight officers. It was divided into three platoons and a headquarters section. There were three twelve-man rifle squads plus a six-man mortar team squad to a platoon. A light infantry outfit, Easy had one machine-gun to each of the rifle squads, and a 60 mm mortar in each mortar team.

Few of the original members of Easy made it through Toccoa. “Officers would come and go,” Winters remarked. “You would take one look at them and know they wouldn’t make it. Some of those guys were just a bowl of butter. They were so awkward they didn’t know how to fall.” This was typical of the men trying for the 506th PIR; it took 500 officer volunteers to produce the 148 who made it through Toccoa, and 5,300 enlisted volunteers to get 1,800 graduates.

· · ·

As the statistics show, Toccoa was a challenge. Colonel Sink’s task was to put the men through basic training, harden them, teach them the rudiments of infantry tactics, prepare them for jump school, and build a regiment that he would lead into combat. “We were sorting men,” Lieutenant Hester recalled, “sorting the fat to the thin and sorting out the no guts.”

Pvt. Ed Tipper said of his first day in Easy, “I looked up at nearby Mount Currahee and told someone, ‘I’ll bet that when we finish the training program here, the last thing they’ll make us do will be to climb to the top of that mountain.’ [Currahee was more a hill than a mountain, but it rose 1,000 feet above the parade ground and dominated the landscape.] A few minutes later, someone blew a whistle. We fell in, were ordered to change to boots and athletic trunks, did so, fell in again — and then ran most of the three miles to the top and back down again.” They lost some men that first day. Within a week, they were running — or at least double-timing — all the way up and back.

At the end of the second week, Tipper went on, “We were told, ‘Relax. No runs today.’ We were taken to the mess hall for a tremendous meal of spaghetti at lunchtime. When we came out of the mess hall, a whistle blew, and we were told, ‘The orders are changed. We run.’ We went to the top of Currahee and back with a couple of ambulances following, and men vomiting spaghetti everywhere along the way. Those who dropped out and accepted the medics’ invitation to ride back in the ambulances found themselves shipped out that same day.”

The men were told that Currahee was an Indian word that meant “We stand alone,” which was the way these paratroopers expected to fight. It became the battle cry of the 506th.

The officers and men ran up and down Currahee three or four times a week. They got so they could do the six-plus-mile round-trip in fifty minutes. In addition, they went through a grueling obstacle course daily, and did push-ups and pull-ups, deep-knee bends and other calisthenics.

When the men were not exercising, they were learning the basics of soldiering. They began with close order drill, then started making night marches with full field equipment. The first night march was eleven miles; on each march that followed a mile or two was added on. These marches were made without a break, without a cigarette, without water. “We were miserable, exhausted, and thought that if we did not get a drink of water we were certain to collapse,” Pvt. Burton “Pat” Christenson recalled. At the end of a march Sobel would check each man’s canteen to see that it was still full.

Those who made it got through because of an intense private determination and because of their desire for public recognition that they were special. Like all elite units around the world, the Airborne had its unique badges and symbols. Once through jump school, they would receive silver wings to wear on the left pocket of their jackets, a patch for their left shoulder, a patch for their hats, and the right to wear paratrooper boots and “blouse” their trousers (tuck the trousers into their boots). Gordon said that “it doesn’t make much sense now [1990], but at the time we were all ready to trade our lives in order to wear these accoutrements of the Airborne.”

The only rest came when they got lectures, on weapons, map and compass reading, infantry tactics, codes, signaling, field telephones, radio equipment, switchboard and wire stringing, demolitions. For unarmed combat and bayonet drills, it was back to using those trembling muscles.

When they were issued their rifles, they were told to treat the weapon as they would treat a wife, gently. It was theirs to have and to hold, to sleep with in the field, to know intimately. They got to where they could take it apart and put it back together blindfolded.

To prepare the men for jump school, Toccoa had a mock-up tower some 35 feet high. A man was strapped into a parachute harness that was connected to 15-foot risers, which in turn were attached to a pulley that rode a cable. Jumping from the tower in the harness, sliding down the cable to the landing, gave the feeling of a real parachute jump and landing.

All these activities were accompanied by shouting in unison, chanting, singing together, or bitching. The language was foul. These nineteen-and twenty-year-old enlisted men, free from the restraints of home and culture, thrown together into an all-male society, coming from all over America, used words as one form of bonding. The one most commonly used, by far, was the
f
-word. It substituted for adjectives, nouns, and verbs. It was used, for example, to describe the cooks: “those f —— ers,” or “f —— ing cooks”; what they did: “f —— ed it up again”; and what they produced. David Kenyon Webster, a Harvard English major, confessed that he found it difficult to adjust to the “vile, monotonous, and unimaginative language.” The language made these boys turning into men feel tough and, more important, insiders, members of a group. Even Webster got used to it, although never to like it.

The men were learning to do more than swear, more than how to fire a rifle, more than that the limits of their physical endurance were much greater than they had ever imagined. They were learning instant, unquestioning obedience. Minor infractions were punished on the spot, usually by requiring the man to do twenty push-ups. More serious infractions cost a man his weekend pass, or several hours marching in full field pack on the parade ground. The Army had a saying, Gordon related: “We can’t make you do anything, but we can make you wish you had.” Brought together by their misery, held together by their cadence counts, singing, and common experiences, they were becoming a family.

The company learned to act as a unit. Within days of the formation of Easy, the 140 men could make a one-quarter or one-half turn, or an about-face, as if one. Or set off at double-time, or on a full run. Or drop to the ground to do push-ups. Or shout “Yes, Sir!” or “No, Sir!” in unison.

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